1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for metering water usage in a commercial structure by individually monitoring each units within the structure and optionally sending the information to the internet for reading.
2. Description of Related Art
The metering of large commercial buildings, such as a large industrial building with individual bays each bay leased or owned by a different entity, has been accomplished mainly by a single meter and the usage divided amongst the users of the building. It has been impractical in many cases to place individual meters on each unit because of the frequent combining and separating of the units merely by erecting walls.
Normally when the single metered building receives a water, gas or electric bill, the owner or manager of the building divides the bill based on the square feet occupied by each of the tenants within the building. While a prorated means of apportionment is considered fair within the trade it is not reflective of the actual utility usage of each of the tenants and some tenants may be subsidizing other tenant's high usage.
Individual meters can be installed in each unit but meters from the utility company are relatively expensive and frequent changes in the operative size of the buildings leads to frequent changes of utility company meters and thus a high cost associated with that approach.
Some approaches have been used in situations where for water utilities plumbing in a building is extremely complex. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,986,573 Issued Nov. 16, 1999 to Franklin et al. there is disclosed a method and apparatus for metering building structures with a plurality of service outlets each having control valves having a transmission system for wirelessly sending signal from each of the meters. Once again the cost of such a system is extremely high on a per unit basis since a transmitter is necessary for each meter and is impractical in all except high end applications.